Chapter 435

Ge Yao presses her declaration, naming Fang Yuan the hero of the plains and arguing that Giant Sun Immortal Venerable took a new young wife every year even past his thousandth year, so age should not matter between them. Fang Yuan’s expression turns dark and he tells her to stop making a scene, but she raises her voice and insists she has genuinely fallen for him. When he answers that he already has a wife, she waves it off, offering to take a concubine’s place beneath his first wife, since old ancestor Giant Sun himself kept hundreds of thousands of concubines to just one empress. ^{ch. 435}

Fang Yuan refuses to remarry, telling her that his ordeal in the wolf’s belly and his soul’s aimless drift over the plains left his heart as still as poison grassland itself, and that he will not return to Chang tribe either. Ge Yao offers Ge tribe instead and accuses him of a heart like iron when he still will not bend. ^{ch. 435}

A large wolf group, drawn by the fire, collides with the wolves already resting nearby, and Ge Yao recognizes it as a thousand beast group. Fang Yuan, backed now by his own wolves, proposes a test rather than retreating: if Ge Yao kills the group’s wolf king alone, he will marry her. She agrees at once and charges into the fight. ^{ch. 435}

While she fights, Fang Yuan privately reflects that love defies reason, and recalls a story from The Legends of Ren Zu: Desolate Ancient Moon’s climb wakes a sleeping love Gu, which resents the disturbance and means revenge, and animates a stone into a rockman as its instrument; the rockman opens his eyes on her and falls in love instead, offering his iron, his copper, his silver and finally his gold, each refused in turn. He opens his own chest and gives her his heart; she keeps it, refuses him still, and later, when he begs for it back to survive, lets him die, telling him only that he stands in the way of her path to success. ^{ch. 435}

Ge Yao returns soaked in blood, carrying the wolf king’s severed head, and asks if Fang Yuan will honor his word. He tells her that her love has moved him and pulls her into an embrace, and she lets the head fall to hold him back. Then he stabs a dagger into her chest. ^{ch. 435}

Ge Yao demands to know why, her face full of shock and hatred, and Fang Yuan answers only by repeating the rockman’s story to her, ending the same way: he stands in her path to success. Hearing it, Ge Yao can no longer stand and collapses to the ground. Dying, she says she does not hate him, offers him all her Gu worms for his own path to success, and asks to be held once more. Fang Yuan does not move, his gaze cold on her, and he watches her stiffen and go still without answering her. He falls into a long silence, looking at her face. ^{ch. 435}